XII
What can be Done?
We can be educated for freedom - much better educated for it than
we are at present. But freedom, as I
have tried to show, is threatened from many directions, and these threats are
of many different kinds - demographic, social, political, psychological. Our disease has a multiplicity of cooperating
causes and is not to be cured except by a multiplicity of cooperating
remedies. In coping with any complex
human situation, we must take account of all the relevant factors, not merely
of a single factor. Nothing short of
everything is ever really enough.
Freedom is menaced, and education for freedom is urgently needed. But so are many other things - for example,
social organization for freedom, birth control for freedom, legislation for
freedom. Let us begin with the last of
these items.
From the time of Magna Carta and even earlier, the makers of English law have been
concerned to protect the physical freedom of the individual. A person who is being kept in prison on
grounds of doubtful legality has the right under the Common Law as clarified by
the statute of 1679, to appeal to one of the higher courts of justice for a
writ of habeas corpus. This writ
is addressed by a judge of the high court to a sheriff or jailer, and commands
him, within a specified period of time, to bring the person he is holding in
custody to the court for an examination of his case - to bring, be it noted,
not the person's written complaint, nor his legal representatives, but his corpus,
his body, the too too solid flesh which has been made
to sleep on boards, to smell the fetid prison air, to eat the revolting prison
food. This concern with the basic
condition of freedom - the absence of physical constraint - is unquestionably
necessary, but is not all that is necessary.
It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free
- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive,
compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state,
or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think, feel and
act. There will never be such a thing as
a writ of habeas mentem; for no sheriff or
jailer can bring an illegally imprisoned mind into court, and no person whose
mind had been made captive by the methods outlined in earlier chapters would be
in a position to complain of his captivity.
The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under
constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own
initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation
does not know that he is a victim. To
him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be
free. That he is not free is apparent
only to other people. His servitude is
strictly objective.
No, I repeat, there can
never be such a thing as a writ of habeas mentem. But there can be preventive
legislation - an outlawing of the psychological slave trade, a statute for the
protection of minds against the unscrupulous purveyors of poisonous propaganda,
modelled on the statutes for the protection of bodies against the unscrupulous
purveyors of adulterated food and dangerous drugs. For example, there could and, I think, there
should be legislation limiting the right of public officials, civil or
military, to subject the captive audiences under their command or in their
custody to sleep teaching. There could
and, I think, there should be legislation prohibiting the use of subliminal
projection in public places or on television screens. There could and, I think, there should be
legislation to prevent political candidates not merely from spending more than
a certain amount of money on their election campaigns, but also to prevent them
from resorting to the kind of anti-rational propaganda that makes nonsense of
the whole democratic process.
Such preventive
legislation might do some good; but if the great impersonal forces now menacing
freedom continue to gather momentum, they cannot do much good for very
long. The best of constitutions and
preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing pressures of
overpopulation and of the over-organization imposed by growing numbers and
advancing technology. The constitutions
will not be abrogated and the good laws will remain on the statute book; but
these liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal
substance. Given unchecked
overpopulation and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic
countries a reversal of the process which transformed
How can we control the
vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? On the verbal level and in general terms, the
question may be answered with the utmost ease.
Consider the problem of overpopulation.
Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural
resources. What is to be done? Obviously we must, with all possible speed,
reduce the birth rate to the point where it does not exceed the death
rate. At the same time we must, with all
possible speed, increase food production, we must institute and implement a
world-wide policy for conserving our soils and our forests, we must develop
practical substitutes, preferably less dangerous and less rapidly exhaustible
than uranium, for our present fuels; and, while husbanding our dwindling
resources of easily available minerals, we must work out new and not too costly
methods for extracting these minerals from ever poorer and poorer ores - the
poorest ore of all being sea water. But
all this, needless to say, is almost infinitely easier said than done. The annual increase of numbers should be
reduced. But how? We are given two choices - famine, pestilence
and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control - and
immediately find ourselves confronted by a problem that is simultaneously a
puzzle in physiology, pharmacology, sociology, psychology and even theology. 'The Pill' has not yet been perfected. When and if it is perfected, how can it be
distributed to the many hundreds of millions of potential mothers (or, if it is
a pill that works upon the male, potential fathers) who will have to take it if
the birth-rate of the species is to be reduced?
And, given existing social customs and the forces of cultural and
psychological inertia, how can those who ought to take the pill, but don't want
to, be persuaded to change their minds?
And what about the objections on the part of the Roman Catholic Church
to any form of birth control except the so-called Rhythm Method - a method,
incidentally, which has proved, hitherto, to be almost completely ineffective
in reducing the birth-rate of those industrially backward societies where such
a reduction is most urgently necessary?
And these questions about the hypothetically perfect Pill must be asked,
with as little prospect of eliciting satisfactory answers, about the chemical
and mechanical methods of birth control already available.
When we pass from the
problems of birth control to the problems of increasing the available food
supply and conserving our natural resources, we find ourselves confronted by
difficulties not perhaps quite so great, but still enormous. There is the problem, first of all, of
education. How soon can the innumerable
peasants and farmers, who are now responsible for raising most of the world's
supply of food, be educated into improving their methods? And when and if they are educated, where will
they find the capital to provide them with the machines, the fuel and
lubricants, the electric power, the fertilizers and the improved strains of
food-plants and domestic animals, without which the best agricultural education
is useless? Similarly, who is going to
educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation? And how are the hungry peasant-citizens of a
country whose population and demands for food are rapidly rising, be prevented
from 'mining the soil'? And, if they can
be prevented, who will pay for their support while the wounded and exhausted
earth is being gradually nursed back, if that is still feasible, to health and
restored to fertility? Or consider the
backward societies that are now trying to industrialize. If they succeed, who is to prevent them, in
their desperate effort to catch up and keep up, from squandering the planet's
irreplaceable resources as stupidly and wantonly as was done, and is still
being done, by their forerunners in the race?
And when the day of reckoning comes, where, in the poorer countries,
will anyone find the scientific manpower and the huge amounts of capital that
will be required to extract the indispensable minerals from ores in which their
concentration is too low, under existing circumstances, to make extraction
technically feasible or economically justifiable? It may be that, in time, a practical answer
to all these questions can be found. But in how much time?
In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against
us. By the end of the present
[twentieth] century, there may, if we try very hard, be twice as much food on
the world's markets as there is today.
But there will also be about twice as many people, and several billions
of these people will be living in partially industrialized countries and
consuming ten times as much power, water, timber and irreplaceable minerals as
their parents are consuming now. In a
word, the food situation will be as bad as it is today, and the raw materials
situation will be considerably worse.
To find a solution to
the problem of over-organization is hardly less difficult than to find a
solution to the problem of natural resources and increasing numbers. On the verbal level and in general terms, the
answer is perfectly simple. Thus, it is
a political axiom that power follows property.
But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast
becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make
arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Or take the right to
vote. In principle, it is a great
privilege. In practice, as recent
history has repeated shown, the right to vote, by itself, is not guarantee of
liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid
dictatorship by plebiscite, break up modern society's vast, machine-like
collectives into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of
functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big
Government.
Overpopulation and
over-organization have produced the modern metropolis, in which a fully human
life of multiple personal relationships has become almost impossible. Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual
impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive
the small country community, or alternatively humanize the metropolis by
creating within its network of mechanical organizations the urban equivalents
of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and cooperate as
complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized functions.
All this is obvious
today and, indeed, was obvious fifty years ago.
From Hilaire Belloc
to Mr Mortimer Adler, from the early apostles of cooperative credit unions to
the land reformers of modern
Professor Skinner of
Harvard has set forth a psychologist's view of the problem in his Walden Two,
a Utopian novel about a self-sustaining and autonomous community so
scientifically organized that nobody is ever led into anti-social temptation
and, without resort to coercion or undesirable propaganda, everyone does what
he or she ought to do, and everyone is happy and creative. In
We see, then, that the
disease of over-organization has been clearly recognized, that various
comprehensive remedies have been prescribed and that experimental treatments of
symptoms have been attempted here and there, often with considerable
success. And yet, in spite of all this
preaching and this exemplary practice, the disease grows steadily worse. We know that it is unsafe to allow power to
be concentrated in the hands of a ruling oligarchy; nevertheless power is in
fact being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. We know that, for most people, life in a huge
modern city is anonymous, atomic, less than fully human; nevertheless the huge
cities grow steadily huger and the pattern of urban-industrial living remains
unchanged. We know that, in a very large
complex society, democracy is almost meaningless except in relation to
autonomous groups of manageable size; nevertheless more and more of every
nation's affairs are managed by the bureaucrats of Big Government and Big
Business. It is only too evident that,
in practice, the problem of over-organization is almost as hard to solve as the
problem of overpopulation. In both cases
we know what ought to be done; but in neither case have we been able, as yet,
to act effectively upon our knowledge.
At this point we find
ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act
upon our knowledge? Does a majority of
the population think it worthwhile to take a good deal of trouble, in order to
halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift towards totalitarian control
of everything? In the United States -
and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as
it will be a few years from now - recent public opinion polls have revealed
that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow,
have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of
unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is
possible, and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the
style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an
oligarchy of assorted experts. That so
many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful
democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government,
so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is
distressing, but not too surprising.
'Free as a bird', we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power
of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a
good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the
privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. If the bread is supplied regularly and
copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by
bread alone - or at least by bread and circuses alone. 'In the end', says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's
parable, 'in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us,
"Make us your slaves, but feed us."'
And when Alyosha Karamazov asks his brother,
the teller of the story, if the Grand Inquisitor is speaking ironically, Ivan
answers: 'Not a bit of it! He claims it
as a merit for himself and his Church that they have vanquished freedom and
done so to make men happy.' Yes, to make
men happy: 'for nothing', the Inquisitor insists, 'has ever been more
insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom.' Nothing, except the absence of freedom; for
when things go badly, and the rations are reduced and the slave drivers step up
their demands, the grounded dodos will clamour again for their wings - only to
renounce them, yet once more, when times grow better and the dodo-farmers
become more lenient and generous. The
young people who now think so poorly of democracy may grow up to become
fighters for freedom. The cry of 'Give
me television and hamburgers, but don't bother me with the responsibilities of
liberty', may give place, under altered circumstances, to the cry of 'Give me
Meanwhile there is
still freedom left in the world. Many
young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without
freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore
supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces
that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to
resist them.